May 17, 2013, Music Meets Science Forum, SwissNex, San Francisco—Brennon Bortz from Virginia Technical University presented their research results in music, sensors, and emotion. The work involves many sensors and other technologies as well as a range of experiments. Controlling music from biofeedback is now relatively easy. The difficulty is in tracking gestures and emotion [...]
May 1, 2013, Neuro-Gaming Conference, San Francisco—The ability to add low-cost sensors as interfaces to games allows the games to track, react to, and incorporate emotions into the game play. A panel moderated by Hugh Brown from Bowen Research considered the issues. Panel members were Ariel Garten from InteraXon, Mike Ambinder from Valve, Susan O’Connor [...]
May 1, 2013, Neuro-Gaming Conference, San Francisco—Closing the loop from monitoring to feedback can be used to track, understand, and boost attention and cognitive performance of players. A panel moderated by Zack Lynch from the Neurotech Industry Organization looked at opening up new avenues for experience development. The panel members were Mike Oxley form Foc.us, [...]
February 20, 2013, ISSCC, San Francisco—This session looked at sensors and displays in various fields. Three of the papers from KAIST in Korea addressed sensors as a part of a touch panel. The other papers covered gravity, sound, current, temperature, and light. Delft University in The Netherlands and Infineon produced a micropower battery current sensor [...]
February 20, 2013, ISSCC, San Francisco—Image sensors are showing higher performance and embedded intelligence. The ubiquity of imagers in all areas of electronics products is producing advances in adjacent areas like medical and 3-D imaging. A 3.4 uw CMOS sensor from Samsung and University of Michigan includes a feature-extraction algorithm for motion-triggered object-of-interest imaging. The [...]
February 4, 2013, Electronic Imaging Conference, Burlingame, CA—Alexander Oberdorster from the Fraunhofer Institute of Optics stated the need for adaptive optics in a plenoptic camera. This concept seems counter-intuitive, since these types of cameras are supposed to allow changing focus and depth of field in post processing. The reason for the adaptation is the nature [...]
January 2013 – At the CES tradeshow this year, CEATEC held a briefing to overview the expo that would be taking place in Japan and some of the themes and exhibitors that would be present. One of the key members of the Japan ecosystem that presented was Murata. The company, incorporated in 1950 after starting [...]
December 13, 2012, Churchill Club, Palo Alto, CA—The Churchill Club held their annual gadgets program to review what’s hot and not in consumer technologies. The presenters are people who get to play with new technologies as a part of their day jobs. This year’s presenters were: Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal, Kara Swisher [...]
December 10, 2012, International Electron Devices Meeting, San Francisco—John Rogers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign described the bifurcating directions of bio-electronics. The field is splitting into integrating biological functions with electronics, and transient electronics. The electronics revolution has transformed dimensions for biological interfaces from room-sized, to hand-held, and now towards embedded and integrated [...]
December 6, 2012, Printed Electronics USA, Santa Clara, CA—Jamshid Avloni from eeonyx talked about smart fabrics and their applications. They have to tailor the electrical and mechanical properties of the components to work in the applications. One application is resistive fabric heaters. Unlike electric blankets with a heater wire snaking around the blanket and causing [...]
